TASVideos
About TASVideos (tool-assisted speedruns) Screenshot of the tool-assisted speedrun. See for a video excerpt of this run.It was in early 1999 that the term "tool-assisted speedrun" was first coined, during the early days of Doom speedrunning, although they were also called "built demos", in accordance with the "demo" terminology. Players first started recording these special demos when Andy "Aurican" Kempling released a modified version of the Doom source code that made it possible to record demos in slow motion and in several sessions. A couple of months afterwards, in June 1999, the first site made for the purpose of sharing these demos, aptly called "Tools-Assisted Speedruns", was opened by Esko Koskimaa, Peo Sjoblom and Yonatan Donner. Like other such communities, the maintainers of the site stressed the fact that their demos were for entertainment purposes rather than skill competitions, although the attempt to have the fastest time possible with tools itself became a competition as well. The site became a success, updating usually several times a week with demos recorded by its maintainers and submitted by its readers. The site was active until August 10, 2001, at which point a news message was posted to state that the site would cease its regular updates and act as archive from then on. The popularity of Doom tool-assisted speedrunning has dwindled since then. In mid-2003, an anonymous speedrunner using the nickname "Morimoto" (originally "もりもと") released a video in which he played through Super Mario Bros. 3 with an unprecedented level of skill: he beat the entire game in just over 11 minutes without making a single mistake, and managed to score 99 lives while in a level during which he had to wait.In addition, he put himself in dangerous situations over and over, only to escape them without sustaining any damage. Although it was widely believed that the video was made by an extremely skilled player, it was actually the first tool-assisted speedrun made with a special emulator to generate widespread interest. When Morimoto detailed the making of the run on his website, many felt deceived and turned to criticizing the video's "illegitimacy" instead. The knowledge that the video was constructed through tedious and careful selective replaying also raised some questions about the authenticity of video game replays; after all, if it is practically impossible to tell the videos of both kinds apart, one cannot possibly know whether a run was made with or without the use of a special emulator. It was even feared that this fact would cause the downfall of competitive speedrunning. Neither the Speed Demos Archive nor Metroid 2002 have ever published runs that were known to be made with a special emulator. Nolan Pflug, the webmaster of Speed Demos Archive, has been quoted as saying "My basic thought is 'don't like them, haven't made them, don't watch them,'" when asked for his opinion on the subject.Thus, in late late 2003, the first public website that served tool-assisted speedrun videos from multiple authors, TASVideos (then known as NESVideos), was created.It was originally created by Joel "Bisqwit" Yliluoma for the purpose of showcasing, sharing and discussing speedruns made with special emulators—at first, the site only held videos of Nintendo (NES) games, in part due to the fact that the only emulator suitable for this specialist purpose was, at that time, the Famtasia NES emulator. Besides just serving the speedrun recordings in the emulator's original format (which, much like Doom and Quake demos, required both the emulator and the game in order to be played back), the site also held AVI files, which were made available using the BitTorrent protocol. As of January 2011, it holds 1698 complete speedruns, of which 817 are the fastest of their kind.